On January 23, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta lifted the ban on women in combat. He gave the generals three years to open up all positions to women, and if any of them think there is a job women can’t do, they’ll have to explain themselves.

The combat arms—infantry, armor, and artillery—are closed to women for good reasons: They can’t do the job, and they keep men from doing the job.

Drones and laser-guided munitions haven’t changed things for a grunt: You still have to run up hills with an 80-pound pack, live in dirt for weeks, and hump 96-pound 155mm artillery shells onto the back of a truck. Your buddies count on you to carry them out of the fight if they are wounded, and they can’t count on someone with half the upper-body strength of a man.

An extensive 1994 Army study of men and women—written by a woman—discovered the obvious: “The average woman does not have the same physical capacity, nor can she be trained to have the same physical capacity as the average man.” There were tests with practically no overlap. On Maximum Lifting Strength, the worst 2 percent of men were at the 92nd percentile for women.

Soldiers may have to kill or be killed at close quarters. All your enemy needs is an extra inch of reach, an extra pound of muscle, or an extra burst of speed, and he will use that advantage to kill you. No one is talking about putting women on professional sports teams—we might lose a game!—but the military is now asking for weak links that could get the whole squad killed.

Last year, a lady Marine captain named Katie Petronio wrote an article for the Marine Corps Gazette called “Get Over It! We Are Not All Created Equal.” She is a pretty tough gal—she says she could bench-press 145 pounds and squat 200 pounds—but when she worked with men in the field, “the rate of my deterioration was noticeably faster than that of male Marines.”

“A soldier’s job is to find the enemy and kill him—yes, him—not to be part of a giant experiment in egalitarian fantasy.”

She writes that if women join up, the infantry is “going to experience a colossal increase in crippling and career-ending medical conditions for females.” Some of these toy soldiers will break before they even see the enemy and then spend their lives drawing disability pay they don’t deserve.
Women in combat? Combat means close quarters. During the 2003 Iraq invasion, Marine Ryan Smith rode in an amphibious assault vehicle designed for 15 men. There were breakdowns and “by the end of the invasion we had as many as 25 men stuffed into the back.” They went 48 straight hours in the vehicle with no sanitation, and men got dysentery. “When an uncontrollable urge hit a Marine, he would be forced to stand, as best he could, hold an MRE [meals ready to eat] bag up to his rear, and defecate inches from his seated comrade’s face.”

When they got to Baghdad:

We had not showered in well over a month and our chemical protective suits were covered in a mixture of filth and dried blood. We were told to strip and place our suits in pits to be burned immediately. My unit stood there…naked, sores dotted all over our bodies, feet peeling, watching our suits burn. Later, they lined us up naked and washed us off with pressure washers.

Squad Leader Smith does not want women in combat.

As ex-Marine John Luddy explained in a Heritage Foundation report, there are other reasons why women don’t belong at the front:

[I]n the one historical case where women were deliberately placed in combat—in Israel during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War—they were removed within weeks. The reason: It was clear that men reacted to the presence of women by trying to protect them and aiding them when they became casualties instead of continuing to attack. The Israelis also learned that unit morale was seriously damaged when men saw women killed and injured on the battlefield.

Men take crazy risks to make sure women are not captured and to rescue them if they are. Remember Jessica Lynch, the 100-pound supply clerk who got into a traffic accident during the Iraq invasion and was taken prisoner? The Army told colossal lies about her Rambo-style knife fight with Iraqis—she went down on her knees to pray and never fired a shot—and then went to absurd lengths to get her back. There was a diversionary battle to draw off Iraqi troops, and a joint team of Delta Force, Army Rangers, Navy Seals, and Air Force Pararescue Jumpers—with much better things to do—snatched her from a hospital that turned out to be unguarded.

PFC Lynch was lucky. She fell into the hands of a regular Army that treated her well. But what would the Taliban do with a captured American woman? Gang-rape her, for sure. Then would she disappear into the most wretched brothel in Afghanistan or come back mutilated and pregnant and a psychological wreck?

{pagebreak}

Finally, there is sex. As one Marine Corps veteran explains, “Male bonding is what takes the hill. And male bonding just doesn’t happen with women around.”
A soldier recently put it this way on a Web page:

The Infantry squad is, hands friggen’ down, the backbone of any armed conflict. They can do anything, anywhere, anytime—because the lives of their buddies depend on it. The bond between men in an Infantry squad is like no other….The addition of women would utterly turn the squad’s level of cohesion and unity upside-down faster than anything. The female would become the center of attention, and the butt-end of every joke. Morale would be a crushing weight dragging the squad down into the dirt.

It destroys what the Army calls “group cohesion” if a man has been jilted by the squad tart and then has to listen to her squealing all night in someone else’s foxhole.

The military hands out condoms as if they were candy, but accidents happen. In the 1990s, Navy Captain Martha Whitehead testified before a military commission that women were three times more likely to be “non-deployable” than men, and that 47 percent of the time it was because they were pregnant.

In 2009, so many pregnant lady soldiers were being evacuated from Iraq that Major General Anthony Cucolo ordered a court martial and possible jail time for any woman in his command who got pregnant—and for the man responsible. “I’ve got a mission to do.” he said. “I’m given a finite number of soldiers with which to do it and I need every one of them.”

There are other problems. From 2006 to 2011, the rate of violent sex crimes in the military shot up 64 percent, with an estimated 19,000 sexual assaults in 2010 alone. Women are 14 percent of Army personnel but are 95 percent of sex-crime victims. (The Army warns there will be more cases of men raping men now that homosexuals don’t have to worry about being kicked out, but that is a different problem.)General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says he thinks women in combat will help solve the problem of sexual harassment. He pushed Leon Panetta very hard to lift the ban. “I have to believe,” he explains, “that the more we can treat people equally, the more likely they are to treat each other equally.” This is certifiably insane.

A man in fighting trim runs on testosterone. That is what makes him an effective killer; it also makes him think about sex every minute of the day. Putting women on the battlefield is like shoving the cheerleaders into the locker room with the team after a football game and locking the doors.

Combat troops are young men who kill people for a living. In the all-volunteer Army they are there because they like killing people. The military throws young women at them and is shocked—shocked—to discover that the men don’t always behave like gentlemen. So the Navy has mandatory anti-sex-assault training for every sailor, and the Army has SHARP (Sexual Harassment/Assault Response & Prevention). They don’t change their idiotic policies; they try to change men.
When Leon Panetta made his announcement, President Obama was delighted:

Today, every American can be proud that our military will grow even stronger with our mothers, wives, sisters and daughters playing a greater role in protecting this country we love.

He got it exactly backward. Men go to war precisely so that their mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters don’t have to go. War is ultimately about national survival. Half the men could die in combat but if women survive, the men who are left can keep the nation going. A society that sends child-bearers into combat has gone mad.

Secretary of the Army Togo West once said that keeping women out of combat slows their promotions and prevents them “from reaching their full potential.” The only men who talk like that wear ribbons instead of helmets. A soldier’s job is to find the enemy and kill him—yes, him—not to be part of a giant experiment in egalitarian fantasy. Only degenerate countries put women in combat.

Of course, it will work for a while—with higher casualties, grinding inefficiencies, and endless lies and cover-ups. But when the century draws to a close and the Chinese write the history of what used to be the United States, they will note that it was a sure sign the place was doomed when the American soldier became a social worker with a rifle instead of a professional killer.

Yesterday I stopped by a Methodist church that was having a charity Christmas-tree sale. A man told me the sale was over for the day and then wished me “Happy Holidays.”

“Don’t you mean ‘Merry Christmas’?” I asked, smoke coming out of my ears.

Yes, this is the season in which we must spare the sensitivities of Jews—and now Hindus and Buddhists and atheists, I suppose—by downgrading Christmas to just another “holiday.” Even people who sell Christmas trees at churches don’t dare utter the offensive word.

Christmas has not been completely rubbed out, though. Surely the preacher, from the safety of his altar, will bring himself to wish the congregation a Merry Christmas. Greater damage to the language has been done by everything having to do with “gender.”

First, let’s get one thing straight: We humans don’t have a gender; we have a sex—until recently, just one each. Gender is a grammatical term used in languages such as French and Spanish to describe the differences between such things as masculine and feminine nouns, and adjectives that agree with them. Examples are la grande fille and le grand garçon. English has gender in such words as waiter/waitress and actor/actress.

“Merry Christmas. Or should I say ‘Mary Christmas’? After all, she did all the work, didn’t she?”

In the past, writers occasionally used “gender” instead of “sex,” as in this 1723 letter written by Lady Mary Montagu:

To say truth, I have never had any great esteem for the fair sex, and my only consolation for being of that gender has been the assurance it gave me of never being married to any one among them.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that feminists cranked up the word “gender” as a replacement for sex, but D. H. Lawrence unwittingly pushed things in that direction back in 1929. He was the first to use the word “sex” as a euphemism for coitus rather than to mean what distinguishes men from women. The expression “to have sex” is an absurd construction when you think about what the word “sex” really means, but it is now ubiquitous. It’s also completely unnecessary. English has plenty of polite words for the act—coitus, copulation, intercourse, rutting, congress—and even situational refinements such as adultery and fornication. The impolite variants are endless.

Thanks to D. H. Lawrence, even movies or books can now “have a lot of sex” in them, when before his time they would have been lewd, lascivious, or lubricious. The point is that once sex ceased to be merely a clinical distinction and also began to mean copulation, the feminists had an opening and offered “gender” as a replacement. But they wanted to do a lot more than that.

Feminists were willing to keep “sex” as a mere biological detail, but “gender” was much more important. It meant all the oppressive freight society loaded onto women which kept them from their natural roles as mathematicians and physicists and made them want to have children. Now we have grotesque expressions such as “gender equality,” “gender-neutral,” and “gender-inclusive.”

“Gender” was meant to work the way “race as a social construct” works. Race, the lefties tell us, is a sociological optical illusion that has nothing to do with biology. We may think there are racial differences, but it’s all in our minds. That’s exactly what feminists wanted us to think about sex. “Gender” means “sex as a social construct.” It’s only brutish custom, not biology, that makes men into soldiers and women into nurses.

{pagebreak}

“Gender” was the name for this fraud that the left trotted out from the world of grammar and dressed up in fancy ideological clothes. So far, no one has come up with a word that means “race as a social construct.” I suggest “render.” It’s just ridiculous enough to appeal to lefties.

But the feminists were too successful with “gender.” It became so common it began to lose its ideological baggage and started to mean just, well, sex. Forms now ask for your “gender”—and it’s not to thwart the jokers who used to write in “as often as possible.”

“Gender” is one of those words that has been slipped into the language for baldly political purposes. “Homeless” is another one. Sometime in the 1970s, all the world’s bums and winos got a promotion and became “the homeless,” as if their trim houses in the suburbs had all just been leveled by tornadoes.

The feminists have done even worse things, such as bullying us into breaking the laws of grammar. It is a peculiarity of English that we use the singular pronoun “he” and the possessive “his” when the subject’s sex is unspecified, as in “Each student has his own desk.” The students can be boys or girls, but each has a desk. Feminists can’t stand this. They claim that “his” excludes half the population, but this is absurd. Did anyone ever think that “He who hesitates is lost” doesn’t apply to women? Or that only men would be living in the workers’ paradise of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”?

Once again, however, Americans have been browbeaten into either the clumsy “his or her” or the ungrammatical “their,” as in “Each student has their own desk.” “Their” is pathetically, miserably wrong. It is the plural possessive, as in “The fourth-graders left their classroom.” However, when Twitter wants you to find out more about someone, you can click to “View their profile.” What craven surrender!

This kind of language subversion comes only from the left. Every change is a tiny attempt to poison someone’s mind—if not yours then your children’s. Today, plenty of young people would be astonished to be told that “Every student should do their homework” is as wrong as “They goes home.”

Every day, the left is beavering away at the language. Fight back. Proudly use such sentences as “Man is a mammal so he suckles his young.”

And in the meantime, Merry Christmas. Or should I say “Mary Christmas”? After all, she did all the work, didn’t she?

Every so often some clown decides to call Thomas Jefferson a “racist,” and other clowns let him publish the charge. The most recent clown is Paul Finkelman, a professor at Albany Law School, and the accessory clowns are The New York Times. Prof. Finkelman is shocked to find that Jefferson thought blacks were less intelligent than whites. And since Jefferson wrote the words “all men are created equal” but bought and sold slaves, that makes him “a creepy, brutal hypocrite.” Like all clowns of his kind, Prof. Finkelmen tells us Jefferson fathered children with his black slave, Sally Hemings.

In other words, it’s the usual rubbish.

James Callender, a transplanted Scotsman, started the Hemings rumor in September 1802 after Jefferson turned him down for a patronage job. Callender claimed the president was sporting with “dusky Sally,” a “wooly-headed concubine,” who was part of his “Congo harem.”

“By the wench Sally our president has had several children,” he wrote, later claiming that the total was five. Callender called Sally a “slut common as the pavement” who was “romping with half a dozen black fellows.”

“Jefferson’s reputation will survive, but that of The New York Times may not.”

Callender never claimed he met “dusky Sally” or explained how he got the dope on her rompings. The next year, Callender drowned in two or three feet of water in the James River, reportedly too drunk to fish himself out, but Jefferson’s Federalist enemies never stopped whooping up the Hemings story. Callender may have been right to claim he had done more damage to Jefferson’s reputation in five months than all his other critics had done in ten years. Deviants have cackled with joy ever since at the thought that Monticello was a love nest of miscegenation.

DNA testing on Sally Hemings’s descendants in 1998 proved that Jefferson was not the father of one of her older children, but that someone who had the Jefferson Y chromosome fathered her youngest child, Eston. The trouble is, there were 26 men of romping age who carried that chromosome and who could have been the father. This includes Randolph Jefferson and his sons, Thomas Jefferson’s nephews, and a number of other men in the Jefferson line. They were all of reproductive age and living in Virginia at the time of conception.

Was it Jefferson? Eston was conceived in 1807 when old Tom was 64, in bad health, and in his second term as president. The chances of the aging, ailing president shacking up with his slave under those circumstances are close to zero. But the Sally rumors had been circulating for five years and had already hurt him.

There are several likelier candidates, and the most likely is Jefferson’s younger brother Randolph, who was a 51-year-old widower. A former Jefferson slave named Isaac later wrote that “Old Master’s brother, Mass Randall, was a mighty simple man: used to come out among black people, play the fiddle and dance half the night”—behavior that could easily lead to romping. Randolph later remarried and had more children, so we know he was a romper. No one ever claimed Thomas Jefferson socialized with slaves.

Any law-school professor has heard of “innocent until proven guilty.” At Albany there must be a new gloss on the doctrine to explain why it doesn’t apply to people who are dead and can’t defend themselves.

{pagebreak}

In July 1802, a Federalist weekly called the Port Folio published a poem that it put into the mouth of a fictional Jefferson slave named Quashee:

And why should one hab de white wife,
And me hab only Quangeroo?
Me no see reason for me life!
No. Quashee hab de white wife too.
Huzza for massa Jeffeson.

And does Prof. Finkelman think there is even a hint of originality in accusing Jefferson of hypocrisy? Jefferson’s enemies were pointing out the silliness of “all men are created equal” before the Hemings rumor even started. Jefferson didn’t believe all men were created equal any more than Prof. Finkelman does, and to handcuff Jefferson to those five words is profoundly stupid. The Declaration of Independence explains to George III why the colonists wanted out. It starts with rhetorical throat-clearing in which the signers say they are the King’s equals and have the right to leave. When the founders got around to writing the rules for actually running their new country—either in the Articles or the Constitution—they didn’t put in any gauzy bunk about equality.

Prof. Finkelman is shocked—shocked—that Jefferson thought blacks were dimmer than whites, but Jefferson was right. Anyone not blinkered by fashionable egalitarian bunk knows he was right. Prof. Finkelman is just as shocked to find out that Jefferson was worried that free blacks could become “pests in society,” but old Tom was on to something there, too. If Prof. Finkelman disagrees, he can tell us whether there is a single Martin Luther King Boulevard he’d like to go strolling on after sundown.

Prof. Finkelman makes it sound as though Jefferson loved slavery and wanted it to go on forever. Jefferson disliked slavery but disliked free Negroes even more. He wanted to emancipate the slaves and deport them “beyond the reach of mixture.”

The title of Prof. Finkleman’s Times article is “The Monster of Monticello.” It must take a lot of courage to spit on Jefferson because he owned slaves, and the professor better be ready to do a lot of spitting: Nine of the first 11 presidents owned slaves, and James Madison, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, Stephen Douglas, William Seward, Francis Scott Key, Winfield Scott, John Marshall, Roger Taney, James Monroe, Henry Clay, and Abraham Lincoln all wanted to send blacks out of the country.

People who actually knew Jefferson found him charming, cultivated, and a man of great honor. At a distance of 186 years, Prof. Finkelman tells us he was “creepy,” but Prof. Finkelman is only the most recent of many creeps. Black Baltimore Sun columnist Gregory Kane tells us Jefferson was a “horny hypocrite” and black columnist Clarence Page called him a “deadbeat dad.” Columnist Richard Grenier likened Jefferson to Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler and called for the Jefferson Memorial to be torn down “stone by stone.” Conor Cruise O’Brien writes that Jefferson is “of necessity abhorrent.”

Jefferson’s reputation will survive, but that of The New York Times may not. It used to be an influential newspaper, but publishing vermin such as Prof. Finkelman will only speed its collapse into irrelevance.

Why do we still read Henry Louis Mencken? He was mostly a columnist, and columns are usually forgotten the day after they are published. One of the main reasons we still read Mencken is that he was enormously funny. The ability to write humorously about serious things is one of the rarest gifts an author can have.

Mencken also wrote about his own times with great detachment. In the 1930s, he had Freud pegged for a quack and predicted that the Soviet Union would run out of gas and collapse. People also still read Mencken because he wrote—in the bluntest possible way—that men are not equal and that it was insane to pretend that they were. He was a eugenicist and he ridiculed democracy. In our era of “sensitivity,” reading Mencken is almost a guilty pleasure.

INEQUALITY

This is what Mencken said about ordinary people:

The mob is inert and moves ahead only when it is dragged or driven….A geological epoch is required to rid it of a single error, and it is so helpless and cowardly that every fresh boon it receives, every lift upon its slow journey upward, must come to it as a free gift from its betters—as a gift not only free but forced.
—Men Versus the Man

As for America:

Here the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head, and is thrown willy-nilly into a meager and exclusive aristocracy.

Mencken laughed at the idea that “all men are created equal.” He argued that the Declaration was a thumb in King George’s eye and that the phrase—if properly translated into ordinary English—meant: “Me and you are as good as anybody else, and maybe a damn sight better.” Mencken pointed out that there is no silly chatter about equality in the Constitution, which contained the rules for actually running the country.

DEMOCRACY AND GOVERNMENT

Mencken wrote:

If it were actually possible to give every citizen an equal voice in the management of the world…the democratic ideal would reduce itself to an absurdity in six months. There would be an end to all progress.
—Men Versus the Man

Mencken was convinced that a democracy cannot produce honest leaders:

The truth, to the overwhelming majority of mankind, is indistinguishable from a headache. After trying a few shots of it on his customers, the aspiring statesman concludes sadly that it must hurt them, and after that he taps a more humane keg, and in a little while the whole audience is singing “Glory, glory hallelujah,” and when the returns come in the candidate is on his way to the White House….The candidates will all promise every man, woman and child in the country whatever he she or it wants. They’ll all be roving the land…curing warts by saying words over them, and paying off the national debt with money that no one will have to earn. They will all know that votes are collared under democracy, not by talking sense but by talking nonsense, and they will apply themselves to the job with a hearty yo-heave-ho.
—A Mencken Chrestomathy

For Mencken, the less government the better:

The ideal government…is one which lets the individual alone—one which barely escapes being government at all.
—Prejudices: Third Series

Mencken was, however, a firm believer in law and order. As a reporter he attended no less than nine hangings, and he thought the rope was an effective and humane way to clear out the dross.

“One of the main reasons we still read Mencken is that he was enormously funny.”

EUGENICS

Mencken was emphatically a eugenicist. This passage uses one of his favorite terms for poor whites—lintheads—from the bits of fluff that got caught in the hair of textile workers:

The great problem ahead of the United States is that of reducing the high differential birthrate of the inferior orders, for example, the hillbillies of Appalachia, the gimme farmers of the Middle West, the lintheads of the South, and the Negroes. The prevailing political mountebanks have sought to put down a discussion of this as immoral: their aim has been to prosper and increase the unfit as much as possible, always at the expense of the fit. But this can’t go on forever, else we’ll have frank ochlocracy in America, and the progress of civilization will be halted altogether.
—Minority Report: H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks

RELIGION

Mencken was a famous scoffer:

What the faithful Christian professes to believe, if put into the form of an affidavit, would be such shocking nonsense that even bishops and archbishops would laugh at it.
—A Treatise on the Gods

However, he recognized that faith was a great solace to many people and did not want to change their minds: In the preface to A Treatise on the Gods he wrote:

There is no purpose here to shake the faithful, for I am completely free of the messianic itch, and do not like converts. Let those who believe, and enjoy it, heave this book into the dustbin, and go on reading the War Cry [the Salvation Army magazine].

THE SOUTH

Mencken considered the entire South a cultural desert, “the Sahara of the Bozart.” As he put it, “There are single acres of Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac.”

When Mencken wrote a column calling Arkansas “the capital of Moronia” and claiming that the people were starving to death through congenital stupidity, the Little Rock legislature voted to censure him. When Mencken was asked to comment, he said, “I didn’t make Arkansas the butt of ridicule. God did it.”

The Arkansas House of Representatives then offered prayers for Mencken’s soul. When the AP asked him what he thought about that, he said:

I felt a great uplift, shooting sensations in my nerves, and the sound of many things in my ears and I knew the house of representatives was praying for me again.

Mencken opposed lynching and thought Southerners should take up bullfighting instead: “every bull that was killed would save a Christian Ethiope.”

Mencken thought it would have been much better for both the North and the South if the South had won the war:

Whatever the defects of the new commonwealth below the Potomac, it would have at least been a commonwealth founded upon a concept of human inequality, and with a superior minority at the helm.

Mencken called the Gettysburg Address a “genuinely stupendous” piece of oratory, but:

Let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday, the doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination—“that government of the people, by the people, and for the people” should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.

{pagebreak}

After Americans began to worship FDR and after the country went to war for the second time against Mencken’s advice, he cut back on his political writing so he could be “a carefree butterfly with no more sense of responsibility than a glamour girl in Hollywood or the President of the United States.”

Mencken despised Roosevelt, writing in his diary that the president was “a fraud from snout to tail,” adding that “he had every quality that morons esteem in their heroes.” As for the New Deal, Mencken called it “just another political swindle, simply a scheme of robbing A to buy the vote of B.” The best he could say about the New Deal was that there was one article of the Bill of Rights it hadn’t violated. So far, no soldiers had been quartered in any man’s house without the owner’s consent.

During this period he worked hard on The American Language, a massive work of scholarship about every nuance of the way Americans write and speak. Here is a passage about what he called the “unearthly” names mothers give their daughters:

The masterpieces of this art show a determination to achieve something unmatched and unimagined, at whatever cost to tradition and decorum….On what other theory is one to arrive at the genesis of Flouzette, Ulestine, Wheirmelda and Moonean? The woman who achieves so shining a novelty not only marks off her little darling from all other little darlings within ear- or rumor-shot; she also establishes herself in her community as a salient social reformer and forward-looker….The woman next door who can fetch up nothing better than Echo, Kiwanis or Apple is plainly of an inferior order.

He wrote about black names:

Medical men making a malaria survey of Northampton County, North Carolina, staggered back to civilization with the news that they had found male Afro-Americans named Handbag, Squirrel, Bootjack, and Solicitor….Many of the double names in vogue among the dark-blanket Christians of the South are the product of piety, for the uneducated Negro is almost as religious as the white Cracker. Examples are King Solomon, Queen Esther, Holy Moses, and Virgin Mary. Once in a while these combinations run to formidable length, recalling the worst imbecilities of the Puritans, e.g., I Will Arise and Go Unto My Father, Jesus Christ and Him Crucified.

THE DIARY

There was much screeching about Mencken’s diary when it was published in 1989. Its editor, Charles Fecher, wrote in the introduction: “Let it be said at once, clearly and unequivocally: Mencken was an anti-Semite.”

Mencken an anti-Semite? This reminds me of an old joke: What do you call someone who hates blacks, Jews, Arabs, Mexicans, and the Chinese? An anti-Semite.

But in his diary, Mencken said nothing unkind about Jews in general; he simply noticed when people were Jewish. He was much more insulting about the South. He said of one man, “He is a Tennessean and will never get over it” and dismissed an Army general as “a southern cracker.” The harshest language in the whole diary was about Southern whites:

Only a rare linthead girl remains a virgin after the age of twelve. Her deflowering, in fact, is usually performed by her brothers, and if not by her brothers, then by her father. Incest is almost as common as fornication among these vermin, and no doubt it is largely responsible for their physical and mental deterioration.

Mencken called poor whites “ill-fed men and filthy, slatternly women and children, who all live like animals and are next to animals in their habits and ideas.”

But there was nonstop howling about anti-Semitism, and even serious talk of taking his name off the H. L. Mencken room at the National Press Club. These self-righteous asses were ignoramuses. Mencken had written very rough things about Jews that had been in print for years. In A Treatise on the Gods, he wrote:

As commonly encountered, they strike other people as predominantly unpleasant, and everywhere on earth they seem to be disliked. This dislike, despite their own belief to the contrary, has nothing to do with their religion: it is founded, rather, on their bad manners, their curious lack of tact. They have an extraordinary capacity for offending and alarming the Goyim.

However, he also wrote that the Bible is a remarkable work of beauty:

All these transcendent riches Christianity inherits from a little tribe of sedentary Bedouins, so obscure and unimportant that secular history scarcely knows them. No heritage of modern man is richer and none has made a more brilliant mark upon human thought, not even the legacy of the Greeks.

Mencken’s harshest passage about Jews is in his introduction to his translation of Nietzsche’s The Antichrist:

On the Continent, the day is saved by the fact that the plutocracy tends to become more and more Jewish. Here the intellectual cynicism of the Jew almost counterbalances his social unpleasantness. If he is destined to lead the plutocracy of the world out of Little Bethel he will fail, of course, to turn it into an aristocracy—i.e., a caste of gentlemen—but he will at least make it clever, and hence worthy of consideration. The case against the Jews is long and damning; it would justify ten thousand times as many pogroms as now go on in the world. But whenever you find a Davidsbündlerschaft making practice against the Philistines, there you will find a Jew laying on. Maybe it was this fact that caused Nietzsche to speak up for the children of Israel quite as often as he spoke against them. He was not blind to their faults, but when he set them beside Christians he could not deny their general superiority.
—The Antichrist

Mencken was accused of being pro-Nazi, but he called Hitler “an idiot followed by idiots.”

On the Jews streaming out of Germany after Hitler came to power, Mencken wrote: “Why shouldn’t the United States take in a couple of hundred thousand of them, or even all of them?”

At one point in his career, Mencken was mistakenly identified as Jewish in some kind of who’s-who listing. When he learned about this, he said he didn’t much mind. His best friends were Jewish and through years of wear and tear he was pretty nearly circumcised.

In his diary, Mencken also said a few mildly unkind things about blacks. The ignoramuses went off like firecrackers about this, too, but they had obviously never read any Mencken. As far back as 1910, he wrote:

So long as we refrain, in the case of the negro loafer, from the measures of extermination we have adopted in the case of parasites further down the scale, we are being amply and even excessively faithful to an ethical ideal which makes constant war upon expediency and common sense.
—Men Versus the Man

And further:

In any chance crowd of Southern Negroes one is bound to note individuals who resemble apes quite as much as they resemble Modern Man, and among the inferior tribes of Africa, say the Bushmen, they are predominant. The same thing is true of any chance crowd of Southern poor whites.
—Minority Report: H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks

However, Mencken recognized the talents of individual blacks. He admired the black writer George Schuyler and was very impressed with a 1926 collection of essays by black intellectuals called The New Negro: An Interpretation:

Here a Negro of a quite new sort comes upon the scene—a Negro full of easy grace and not at all flustered by good society. He discusses the problems of his people soberly, shrewdly and without heat….Here, indeed, the Negro challenges the white Southerner on a common ground, and beats him hands down.

However, in the same article, Mencken says this about Negro progress:

There are serious difficulties in their way. The vast majority of people of their race are but two or three inches removed from gorillas: it will be a sheer impossibility, for a long, long while, to interest them in anything above pork-chops and bootleg gin.
—“The Aframerican: New Style,” in the American Mercury

But let us not forget how he wrote about whites:

If all the farmers in the Dust Bowl were shot tomorrow, and all the share-croppers in the South burned at the stake, every decent American would be better off, and not a soul would miss a meal.
—Minority Report: H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks

And further:

If all the inhabitants of the Appalachian chain succumbed to some sudden pestilence tomorrow, the effect upon civilization would be but little more than that of the fall of a meteor into the Ross Sea.
—Minority Report: H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks

Sometimes Mencken thought of himself as an American Voltaire, but even Voltaire said this when he was asked for a comment after learning an enemy had died: “He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend; provided, of course, he really is dead.”

Jared Taylor is the editor of AmRen.com and the author of White Identity. This was an excerpt from a recent speech he delivered at a private gathering of Mencken admirers.

The media love disaster. One can hardly sit through a half hour of cable news without hearing dire prophecies of “climate change” and other ecotastrophes. And over the past year, television pundits have warned incessantly that without massive Wall Street bailouts and compulsory Swine Flu vaccinations, the sky just might fall. This all comes on the heels of years of talk of terrorist attacks and the potential for the African AIDs epidemic to infect the middle class.

Not all of this is hysteria, of course, and without question the United States faces real economic and security challenges. But the most obvious, perilous, and, most importantly, preventable catastrophe looming on America’s horizon is one that the media and political class refuse to talk about.

In his famous speech of April 20, 1968, the British statesman Enoch Powell said, “The discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician.”

One great, avoidable evil we face is the declining quality of the American work force.

The Census Bureau tells us that if immigration continues at its current rate of nearly two million people a year, whites will become a minority of the under-18 child population in just 14 years—in 2023—and will become a minority of the working population just 16 years later. The greatest increase will be in Hispanics, who are now dropping out of high school at higher rates than blacks, doing little better than blacks when they manage to stay in school, and are the group least likely to go to college. Demographers are beginning to warn that as well-educated, white baby boomers retire and are replaced by poorly educated blacks and Hispanics, the productivity gains of the last several hundred years will be reversed, and the United States could go into a tailspin.

“We have the possibility of transforming the American dream into the American tragedy,” says Irwin Kirsch, senior research director at the Educational Testing Service. He warns that our increasingly non-white and immigrant workforce threatens not only our standard of living, but the very survival of republican government based on an informed middle class.

Here are some of the facts. In 2007, 93.5 percent of white and 93.1 percent of Asian 18- to 24-year-olds had graduated from high school. The figures for blacks and Hispanics were 88.8 percent and 72.7 percent, meaning that Hispanics were more than four times more likely than whites and 2.4 times more likely than blacks to have failed to graduate from high school.

Part of the problem for immigrants is adjusting to the U.S.; Hispanics born here are more likely to finish high school than those who immigrate as children. However, the graduation rate slightly decreases for the second U.S.-born generation (85.1 percent vs. 85.9 percent), so that in 2007, even after three generations in the United States, Hispanics had a dropout rate that was still 2.3 times the white rate and 33 percent higher than the black rate.

Big-city public school districts, which are heavily black and Hispanic, have appalling records. In Detroit, only 26.8 percent of students graduated on time in 2006. The other worst performers were Philadelphia: 39.1 percent, Dallas: 40.7 percent, Los Angeles: 47.7 percent, and Washington, DC: 48.8 percent.

Jefferson High School, which is 90 percent Hispanic and 10 percent black, had the worst dropout rate in Los Angeles: 58 percent. That is not the figure for students who fail to graduate on time; those students do not graduate at all.

Hispanics who stay in school do badly. In 2007, their fourth-grade performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading test was the same as blacks: already two years behind whites and Asians. By 12th grade, the average black or Hispanic is reading and doing math at the level of the average white 8th-grader.

Hispanics are the least likely group to go to college. In 2003, 28 percent of Hispanics aged 18 to 24 were enrolled in college, compared to 38 percent of blacks and 52 percent of whites. Most groups have been increasing their college attendance rates, but between 1974 and 2003, rates for Hispanic men declined. Again, the problem is not just one of adapting to the United States. College graduation rates for U.S.-born Hispanics are only slightly better than those for immigrants, and Hispanics who have been in the country for three generations or more are still less likely even than blacks to graduate from college.

In recent times, the American workforce has been the best educated in the world: 85 percent of adult Americans are high school graduates, up from just 25 percent in 1940. Twenty-eight percent have a college degree, a fivefold increase since 1940. Better education helped raise real average per capita income in the United States 40 percent between 1980 and 2000.

This rise in income will reverse as black, Hispanic, and immigrant workers replace whites. California will be particularly hard hit because of its large Hispanic population. By 2009, 50 percent of its public school students were Hispanic, as were nearly three quarters of the 700,000 children in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Two-thirds of kindergarteners were Hispanic and many could not speak English.

According to a 2007 report from the Migration Policy Institute, an estimated 400,000 legal immigrants and 350,000 illegal immigrants were illiterate in their native languages, much less English. This contributed to the first decline in literacy in California’s history. In 2003, its adult illiteracy rate of 23 percent—up 50 percent in 10 years—put it last among all states.

The California Dropout Research Project at UC Santa Barbara estimated in 2009 that because high school dropouts commit more crime than students who stay in school, dropouts cost California $1.1 billion annually in law enforcement costs and victim damages while they are still minors. This estimate did not include lost productivity costs as adults or continuing public outlays for adult criminals and indigents.

The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education predicts that because of declining education and productivity, average per capita income for the nation will have fallen two percent by 2020. For California, because of its heavily Hispanic population, the center predicted a real per capita income decline of $2,467 or no less than 10.8 percent, the biggest loss for any state. “For the U.S. economy, the implication of these trends is really stark,” said Patrick Callan, president of the center.

Texas faces serious problems, too. State demographer Steve H. Murdock notes that if immigration continues, the Texas public schools will be 80 percent minority by 2040, up from 57 percent in 2000. He calculates that if black and Hispanic graduation rates do not improve, by 2040 Texans will see real, average per capita income fall by $6,500. Mr. Murdock warns of a surge in crime, poverty, and every other social problem.

McKenzie and Company estimates that if black and Hispanic students had been able to close the achievement gap in 1998, American GDP 10 years later would have been larger by up to half-a-trillion dollars.

The Educational Testing Service (ETS), based in New Jersey, predicts that all states will see a drop in reading and math ability. Andrew Sum of Northeastern University in Boston works with ETS on research projects. “There is no time that I can tell you in the last hundred years,” he says, when literacy and numeracy have declined, “but if you don’t change outcomes for a wide variety of groups, this is the future we face.”

The U.S. is slipping badly in comparison with other developed countries. ETS has also analyzed the results of the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS), which tests the math and verbal abilities of adults in the 20 richest countries. The United States ranked 12th out of 20 in both math and reading; Australia and Belgium are among the countries that score better than we do. ETS’s most eye-opening conclusions, however, come from breaking out the scores of different groups.

If blacks, Hispanics, and immigrants are excluded from the American results, our performance rises from 12th, to 2nd in reading and 5th in math. This means immigrants, blacks, and Hispanics are dragging our rating down to 12th from 2nd and 5th. Likewise, the oldest Americans (56 and older) came in second in reading whereas younger Americans, those 26-35 and 16-25 years old, ranked 11th and 14th, respectively. The oldest age groups—the ones with the most whites—do the best while the youngest groups with the fewest whites to worst. The ETS also found that native-born blacks and Hispanics performed at only the 28th percentile, compared to other rich countries, and immigrants at only the 17th percentile.

The same racial pattern is found in student scores. The Program for International Student Assessment is run by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Every three years it tests the academic abilities of 15-year-olds in many different countries, and American scores have been declining steadily. In 2006, the United States ranked 29th on the science/math ability scale, lagging behind Latvia and Croatia. However, if the scores only of whites were counted, the U.S. ranked 10th, in the company of Japan, Hong Kong, and New Zealand. Hispanics-only scores fall to 40th, and blacks-only scores to 50th, just ahead of Indonesia. American scores are worse than they seem. By age 15, many of the worst performing American students have dropped out, which means those who are tested are not a representative sample.

Many Americans have criticized companies for moving white-collar jobs overseas because labor is cheaper. In coming decades, companies may move them offshore because they can’t find Americans who can do them at any wage.

Our rulers are not completely unaware of what is happening. The No Child Left Behind Act was passed by overwhelming, bi-partisan majorities in 2002 to improve student performance and bridge achievement gaps. The government budgeted $24.4 billion for the program for fiscal year 2007, and its requirements for “Adequate Yearly Progress” have forced huge changes on many schools. This is only the latest effort in more than 25 years of federal attempts to improve education. The result? In 2009, Chester E. Finn Jr., a former education official in the Reagan administration, put it this way: “This is a nearly unrelenting tale of woe and disappointment. If there’s any good news here, I can’t find it.”

Lagging non-white achievement is such a preoccupation that in 2007, 4,000 educators and experts attended an “Achievement Gap Summit” held in Sacramento. They attended no fewer than 125 panels on how to help blacks and Hispanics do as well as whites and Asians. There are about 16,000 school districts in the United States, and not one has figured out how to do that—but we all keep pretending it’s possible.

“Re-segregation,” a favorite liberal bugaboo, is also manifestly not the cause of our current woes. Blacks and Hispanics score in equivalent ranges, whether they account for fewer than five percent of a state’s student population or more than 20 percent. The states with the highest overall student scores have racial gaps that are equal to or even wider than states with lower overall scores.

What would most baffle Enoch Powell about all this is why there is so much talk about bridging the achievement gaps but so little talk about keeping Hispanic immigrants out of the country. If Hispanics are not good additions to the workforce, why let more in? The United States is like a badly leaking ship that is in sight of a dry dock. Instead of sailing into the dock and fixing the leak, it devotes so much power to running pumps that it can’t drive the propellers anymore.

An increasingly Hispanic workforce is, in Powell’s terms, an avoidable evil. But we will fail to avoid it simply because we are unable say to Mexicans, “Your lot isn’t working out too well here, so stay home.” Instead, we try one preposterous gap-closing scheme after another and wonder why we can’t get blood from turnips.

The Great Chinese Encyclopedia, edition of 2039, will, no doubt, have a thoughtful article entitled “The Decline of the West.” By then, the white man’s downfall will be obvious to everyone, but the reasons for it will baffle even the best Chinese minds. The article will conclude, with a shrug, that Occidentals are inscrutable.

This article is adapted from a forthcoming book on race and immigration.

Lost in Justin Raimondo’s torrent of mistaken assumptions and wild accusations is one useful question: What do “white nationalists” want? By putting the term in quotation marks, Mr. Raimondo has stumbled onto an important truth, namely, that there is no accepted term for contemporary Americans who still hold some of the views about race that were taken for granted by virtually all Americans until about the 1950s.

Until then, most people believed race was an important aspect of individual and group identity. They believed that the races differed in temperament and ability, and whites preferred the societies built by whites to those built by non-whites. They wanted the United States to be peopled by Europeans because they believed only people of European stock would maintain the civilization they valued. These views were so wide-spread, so taken for granted, so indisputable that there was no term for them. Just as there was no name for people who expected the sun to rise in the East, there was no name for people whose views are today sometimes given the clumsy term “white nationalism.”

The national-origins immigration policy that lasted until 1965 embodied this basic understanding of race. As one of the supporters of that policy, Congressman William Vaile of Colorado explained in 1924, “[the United States] is a good country. It suits us. And what we assert is that we are not going to surrender it to somebody else or allow other people, no matter what their merits, to make it something different.” I might add that even if this sentiment shocks Americans today, it is exactly the view of their own country held by virtually every Japanese, Israeli, or Mexican.

What perhaps most succinctly characterizes those whom Mr. Raimondo calls “white nationalists” is the conviction that it was a terrible mistake to abandon national-origins quotas and throw the United States open to immigration from everywhere. As Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina wondered at the time: “What is wrong with the national origins of the American people? What is wrong with maintaining them? What is wrong with preferring as immigrants one’s own kinsmen?” There were no good answers to those questions then and there is none today.

I believe Sam Ervin—and Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt—shared my desire for a country in which our ancestors were respected as pioneers and statesmen, not reviled as murderers and thieves. I believe they wanted a country in which their children’s children would walk in the ways of their forebears, sing the same songs, worship the same God, revere the same heroes, and proudly carry forward the civilization and culture of the West. I am certain they believed this would be possible only in a nation whose majority people were the biological heirs to the creators of that culture and civilization.

My hopes for the land in which my descendants will live are no different from those of virtually every person who has ever lived anywhere. The idea that nothing will be lost if a founding population is replaced with aliens is a new disease that strikes only whites. Our Mexican neighbors would scoff at the notion that “diversity” is a strength or that millions of English-speaking, white-skinned immigrants were a form of “cultural enrichment.” They would be astonished at the idea of elevating to a position of power a gringa who claimed white women made better decisions than Mexican men. In all these things they could not be more natural, normal, or healthy. It is we who have betrayed the ideals of our ancestors and diced with our children’s future by opening the doors to dispossession.

Is dispossession too strong a word? Just visit Detroit or Miami or parts of Los Angeles. You will not find the civilization Jefferson or Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt thought they were building for their children. There are great swathes of America in which Spanish—or even Chinese—is the lingua franca, and where English-speakers are out of place. At the college down the road there are footbaths in the student union so Muslim immigrants can clean their feet before salaaming in the worship area they demanded be set aside for them. Washington’s and Jefferson’s names are being pulled down from public schools to be replaced with Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King.

I am not certain it is possible to salvage from the chaos immigration is bringing to this country a nation of which my grandchildren can even feel a part, much less be proud. But unless whites wake up from their stupor, unless they—like the white firemen of New Haven—realize they have legitimate rights as a group and are prepared to fight for them, they will be shoved aside by Africans, Asians, Mexicans, Haitians, and Muslims who have, in addition to very sharp elbows, a keen sense of their own interests.

It is certainly true that there are many group identifications besides race. Our deepest ties are to our families, and our loyalties expand in concentric and overlapping circles: clubs, friends, work groups, nationalities, even cities and states. But the largest group to which most people feel a natural loyalty is race. That is because race marks the limit of our extended families, and defines the group to which we are genetically closer than to any other.

Loyalties of this kind are not rational but they are no less powerful for this reason. I love my own children more than I love the children of strangers, not because they are objectively superior but because they are mine. No one disputes my right to this irrational loyalty—nor should they dispute my right to an equally irrational, equally deep and genetic loyalty to my extended family.

At the same time, though I make sacrifices for my own children that I would never make for the children of others, this implies no ill feeling for other children. I can even have great affection for other children but mine come first. It should not require pointing out that, in like manner, loyalty to a race or nation need imply no ill feeling for any other. I can admire and like the Chinese or the Watusi without wanting my own country or my own descendants to become Chinese or Watusi. They, in turn, have no desire to fill their countries with Europeans.

Mr. Raimondo seems to think only a Nazi could oppose miscegenation or care about the racial/ethnic composition of his country. I’m sure we can count on him to explain to Israelis who want a Jewish state, and to the many Jews and blacks who oppose inter-marriage that they are actually Nazis. And, of course, the many Americans who opposed what they called “amalgamation” and even passed laws to forbid it were all Nazis long before Nazism. The Japanese, who would rather invent clever robots than encourage immigrants, and the Mexicans who do not let non-citizens own property are no doubt Nazis, too. This is the sort of silliness that comes from thinking in clichés, from swallowing the mantras of liberal egalitarianism.

Mr. Raimondo seems to insist on looking at everything from a libertarian perspective so let us adopt one. Mr. Raimondo does not appear to understand that I am not proposing a state-enforced caste system; I want to dismantle the one we have, the one that turned the New Haven firemen into untouchables. Likewise, I have always stood for completely free association, and if someone wants to associate across racial lines that is his business. In 1843, Massachusetts repealed its anti-miscegenation laws for the same reason I oppose them: healthy societies don’t need them.

Many doctrinaire libertarians think there should not even be immigration control. They argue that in an ideal world of private property each property owner could set his own immigration policy. Until that day comes, I am certainly not proposing an expansion of state power; merely a policy that preserves our heritage rather than devour it.

And what if, like Mr. Raimondo, we are to put libertarianism before the preservation of race or heritage? Perhaps he has not noticed that it is only whites who have even imagined an individualism as pure as libertarianism. How many non-white allies has he found in his battle against the state? Does he really think Mexicans and Africans will help him dismantle state power rather than seize it for their own purposes? By ignoring race Mr. Raimondo is ensuring the failure of what I take to be his most cherished project.

Where Mr. Raimondo and I most clearly part company is that I am in earnest about the survival of my people and their civilization. For that I apologize to no one. If Mr. Raimondo does not see the crisis, he has every right to enjoy his ignorance, but he joins forces with the very multi-culturalists he claims to oppose when he denies to whites an awareness of their group interests without which they are doomed to oblivion.

Thanks to a group of disgruntled firemen, the question of what it means to be white is back in the news. By late June, the Supreme Court will decide whether the city of New Haven, Connecticut was right to throw out the results of a promotions test for lieutenant and captain only because the top scorers were white. The city badly wanted blacks, so it has left the jobs unfilled rather than promote any more undesirable white men. The city argues that since the scores of every test-taker—black, white, and Hispanic—were all thrown out, there can have been no discrimination.

That argument reminds me of the one Bob Jones University made when the Supreme Court lifted its tax-exempt status in 1983. Bob Jones was letting in students of all races but banned interracial dating on Biblical grounds. It said this could hardly be discrimination, since the ban applied to all races, who were equally benefitted (or inconvenienced, depending on your point of view). Somehow, the justices did not go along, though they failed to explain what was wrong with an argument that, for a private religious college, seems pretty close to airtight. We shall see whether the court buys the argument that since New Haven threw out the scores of the black losers as well as the white winners there was no discrimination.

There is nothing new about what happened to these firemen. Ever since the 1970s, whites have been the only people you can discriminate against legally and openly—and you can claim to be fighting discrimination when you do it. But it may be that after 30 years of this, even the white worm has begun to turn. In a letter about the firemen that the New York Times published on April 22, someone named Audrey Abramov seems to have stumbled onto the view that “it appears that being white not only is no longer an advantage, but is now a liability.”

The Times should know better than that. It has long agreed with black columnist William Raspberry, who used to say that “it’s always illegitimate for white men to organize as white men,” and that is exactly what the New Haven firemen are doing, even though they brought one Hispanic into the suit for protective coloring. Another black columnist, Shelby Steele, has described accurately the kind of ideological foreclosure that has informed racial discourse in America since the ‘60s: “eyond an identity that apologizes for white supremacy, absolutely no white identity is permissible. In fact, if there is a white racial identity today it would have to be white guilt—a shared, even unifying, lack of racial moral authority.”

White men can organize after all, but only to apologize. Fortunately for them, they love to apologize. Only since 2008, the state legislatures of Alabama, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida all officially apologized for slavery. Colorado never had slavery so it apologized to Indians instead.

Australia has apologized to the Abos, the American Medical Association apologized to black doctors, the Baptist Church apologized to black Christians, Canada is in a perpetual state of apology to “first peoples,” and when Mayor Ken Livingstone apologized in 2007 for London’s role in the slave trade, he was so excited he broke down in tears. By sticking up for their rights as white people, the New Haven boys are breaking the rules.

Of course, it’s always good to know what the rules are, and in 2005, a fellow named Justin Moritz discovered one. He applied to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for a trademark on the words “White Pride Country Wide.” The USPTO turned him down, say that “the ‘white pride’ element of the proposed mark is considered offensive and therefore scandalous.” Mr. Moritz reports that the USPTO had already trademarked “Black Power” and “Black Supremacy,” and that the agency finds nothing scandalous in pride so long as it isn’t white. These and a host of other “prides” are all trademarked: “African Pride,” “Native Pride!” “Asian Pride,” “Black Pride,” “Long Beach Lesbian and Gay Pride,” “Orgullo Hispano” (Hispanic Pride), “Mexican Pride,” and “African Man Pride.”

Whatever firemen may think, the important people in this country agree with the USPTO. The California Supreme Court is about to take up the case of Proposition 209, the ballot initiative passed in 1996 that bans state discrimination in contracting or college admissions. California has been squirming its way around the ban ever since, and former governor and current state attorney general Jerry Brown has filed a brief asking the court to dump the ban once and for all. He has the official line down pat:

A ban on discrimination fosters discrimination because it is discrimination against non-whites not to discriminate in their favor.

So what’s a (white) boy to do? There is an honorable tradition in the history of hopeless causes: If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Just wait a few decades and whites will be a minority, too, and can all jump on the affirmative-action band wagon. Except it may not work out that way. Whites are already a minority in California, Hawaii, New Mexico, and Texas, and there is no sign it does them any good. Whites are really a minority in Detroit, but they are somehow not flocking to the city to enjoy the benefits.

The real solution may have to wait another generation or two after which, if some who call themselves conservatives have their way, there will have been so much miscegenation there will be no more white people left to worry about. “My great wish,” says conservative pundit Michael Barone, “is that 50 years from now we will be so mixed there will be no more racial categories.” “It would be a lot easier if each of us were related to someone of another color and if, eventually, we were all one color,” writes Morton Kondracke in The New Republic. Douglas Besharov of the American Enterprise Institute says miscegenation may be “the best hope for the future of American race relations.” Ben Wattenberg says that once we are all “bland and blended . . . we will fulfill our difficult destiny as the first universal nation.” Andrew Sullivan, former editor of The New Republic writes that “miscegenation has always been the ultimate solution to America’s racial divisions.”

Europeans want the same thing. Ségolène Royale was the Socialist candidate in the French presidential elections in 2007. “Miscegenation is an opportunity for France,” she said, adding that as president she would encourage immigration and would be “president of a France that is mixed-race and proud of it.” Nicolas Sarkozy, the conservative who beat her, spoke fondly of “a France that understands that creation comes from mixing, from openness, and from coming together—I’m not afraid of the word—from miscegenation.” Jozef Ritzen, Dutch Minister of Education, Culture, and Science, explained that “this is the trend worldwide. The white race will in the long term become extinct. . . . Apparently we are happy with this development.”

If those New Haven firemen got a raw deal, I guess their parents just married the wrong people.

All boys dream of acts of heroic violence. By the age of seven or eight they have saved their mothers from countless imaginary villains, and as they get older they save other even more interesting females.

The trouble is that for those of us who do not make a living carrying a gun, opportunities for heroic violence don’t come very often, and when they come we are likely to muff them. I have had two such opportunities.

The first time, I was living in a dodgy part of Washington, D.C. One afternoon, I heard confused cries of “stop him,” and “thief,” and a young black man sprinted by, not 20 feet away. I just stood and watched. I stood and watched as a white guy jogged after him. There was no chance the jogger would catch him, and I thought he was probably just pretending.

I went home and brooded. I was just out of college, where I had been a respectable quarter-miler, and I couldn’t understand why I didn’t chase down that robber and thrash him. It must have been the suddenness and the unexpectedness that paralyzed me, but I did nothing. I felt ashamed whenever I thought about it.

About five years later I got another chance. I was coming out of the Macy’s department store in New York City with my mother, with a big shopping bag in each hand. Once again there were confused shouts, and I saw a man break out of a crowd at a run. This time, I dropped the bags on the sidewalk and went after him instantly. He ran down the stairs into a subway station, sprinted along a corridor, and out another exit onto a street that was surprisingly deserted.

It must have been because of the accumulated shame of all those times I had reproached myself for not catching the robber in Washington, but I was mad enough to kill this one. To my amazement, I heard myself raging at him, cursing him. It must have slowed me down, and it warned him I was after him, but I couldn’t help it. I tackled the man and he went face down. I turned him over and shouted, “What did you take?”

He then did something that saved him from a terrific beating. He went completely limp. He laid his head back on the sidewalk, stretched out his throat, put his hands up by his head, and opened them wide. He was holding a gold-colored necklace, which he let me take without the slightest resistance.

I have since marveled at this many times, but in that space of perhaps a second, all my fury drained out of me. His complete submission took the anger out of me like the air out of a balloon. An instant earlier, I had been ready to kill him, and I’m sure I would have beaten him bloody him if he had tried to fight me. But on his back and helpless, I didn’t know what to do with him any more. I let him up, and he turned to go. “Never do that again,” I said, and he loped off down that strangely deserted street.

I walked back to Macy’s and found a knot of people standing around a woman. The thief must have ripped the necklace right off her throat, because she was crying and holding her neck. She hardly noticed me when I gave her the necklace, but a man standing next to her thanked me, staring at me with big, grateful eyes.

I found my mother. She had not even seen me go, and had turned to find her bags dropped on the sidewalk. She pointed out that I was bleeding. Tackling a man on a sidewalk is rough business. The backs of my hands were banged up, and both elbows and knees were bleeding. I had been wearing flip-flops, of all things, and had scraped the skin off the tops of my toes. I hadn’t noticed any of this.

I think there were lessons here. In Washington I learned that in an emergency I cannot count on myself to do the right thing instinctively. I was immobilized by the unexpected. Only after rehearsing my humiliation dozens of times in my mind did I react instantly. Soldiers say that in battle, they fight the way they train. Maybe some people do the right thing instinctively, but some of us need training or mental preparation for the unexpected.

Another lesson was that high emotion begets primitive behavior. People who observe wolves in the wild say that when they fight, the loser can stop the violence immediately by offering his throat to his opponent. This gesture of submission takes all the fight out of the stronger wolf, and instead of snapping at the jugular he lets the weaker wolf walk away.

Humans must have some of this in us, too. When I brought that man down, he must have known it was pointless to resist. Maybe my bellowing helped convince him he was in the presence of a superior force, and that he had better show his throat. Instinct must have told him this was the best way to draw off my fury, and he was right

“You just don’t have the killer instinct,” one friend said. He thought I should have given the jerk a good pounding, and held him for the police. That would have made for a much better story, but after all the fight went out of him, it went out of me, too.

So when you imagine yourself dealing out heroic violence, I have a warning: If something catches you completely by surprise, you may be too stupefied to act. And when the fight starts, your instincts—both for mayhem and for mercy—may surprise you.